Shedding Light to the Secret Garden of Politics: Candidate Viability and Gender

• In Event: Intra-Party Agenda Setting in Advanced Industrialized Democracies

Abstract

Candidate selection has been aptly named the “secret garden of politics” – a process that largely determines a party’s public face in legislative institutions but one that often remains hidden from the public eye. While past decades have seen some surge in scholarship examining candidate selection, in general, less attention has been paid to the diversity across different types of candidacies. Not all electoral candidacies are equal. While in first-past-the-post systems, candidates’ chances to be elected depend on the constituency she runs in, under PR-list rules, it depends largely on her party list placement. While past research provides evidence that women are often overrepresented among hopeless candidates, most of past literature has focused on one legislature and/or one point in time, making it impossible to study cross-national and over time differences in the effect gender has on candidate viability. I study viable candidate selection in the context of the 2009-2019 European Parliament elections. The three rounds of EP elections provide an excellent testing ground as the majority of the EU member states employ either a closed or ordered-list PR-list voting system. The results of the analysis suggest that women’s chances for viable candidacy differ across time, specific voting system and party ideology. Overall, women are placed lower in the electoral lists in ordered-list systems compared to closed-
list systems, and while every subsequent election increases women’s likelihood for highly viable list position in left-leaning parties, it is not the case for women representing right-leaning parties.

Author

• Maarja Luhiste, Newcastle University